Everything Everywhere All At Dunce
I'm going to write about Marvel. Let's get this over with.
When I walked out of the AMC Lincoln Square IMAX after (the first time) watching Everything Everywhere All at Once, I thought about a lot of things.
I ended up walking back through Central Park in the early evening playing the movie over and over in my head and trying to grasp how the directing team of the Daniels was able to make such an action-packed, comedic and emotionally resonant film with true cinematic legends from within the Hollywood machine. Maybe you have problems with something or other with Everything—I certainly don’t—but I can’t fathom seeing it and thinking that it isn’t creative as hell with a real fuck it, let’s try everything mentality.
It’s really depressing to see something so innovative and then have that be followed up with posts detailing why Marvel should try to pick up this creative duo for whatever it has next.
This happens over and over again. I understand the appeal of the money and the biggest possible canvas, but it’s a real bummer when directors with a lot to say get immediately sucked in by a machine that’s going to hamper them and force them to have tie-ins, post-credit sequences and specific plot-points to lead to movies years down the road.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is partly so incredible, because you truly don’t know where it’s going. The Avengers may go through some bumps and bruises but an iteration of them won’t be going anywhere. There are toys to sell.
Edgar Wright nearly lost years of his directing life to work on Ant-Man, and impressive directors like Ryan Coogler, Taika Waititi and Destin Daniel Cretton are all cogs in this cinematic universe instead of making their own stuff. This isn’t to say that it’s all garbage; I love Thor: Ragnarok. I would just prefer something original like Hunt for the Wilderpeople or What We Do in the Shadows. You can’t watch Cretton’s Short Term 12 and then Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and see a director with control. It’s a potpourri of threads tangled up.
We’ve reached a point where lofty “arthouse” films are being compared to behemoths. Other than Spider-Man: No Way Home, it’s been rough-sledding for theaters. There have been more obscure (in a relative sense) bright spots like The Lost City, Dog and Jackass Forever, but there seems to be a push for “blockbusters only” in increasingly unfortunate ways.
What a sad sentence.
Imagine seeing a movie and having your first thought afterward be let’s get this director into some open intellectual property. We haven’t seen Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben die enough times yet.
I’m going to see Doctor Strange when it comes out and I’m sure it’ll be pretty good. There’s a high floor and low ceiling with these things. I’m fine with a B- to B+ movie every so often. I just don’t want that to be all there is.
It seems as good a time as any to recommend the new movie L'événement, also known as Happening in English. This movie about a bright student in 1960s France trying to deal with an unwanted pregnancy is unfathomably (and ridiculously) more relevant than ever. It shows the trials and tribulations taken by young women as their government leaves them (and all of us) out to dry, and it’s infuriating in its portrait of those in power. The movie itself is assertive but never in an overly-righteous way. It’s a very precise story that uses its specificity to attack a larger wrong, and that’s what makes it worth your time. You can donate to an abortion fund here.